Archive for 2012

ShareTweet If there’s one thing I love about this industry it’s that we are not backwards in coming forwards. Whilst there are a number of fantastic conferences run by larger organisations, dedicated event and publisher groups there is no shortage of people that are creating, organising and growing independent or not-for-profit conferences within this sector. I wanted to find out about the challenges these (often volunteer) conference organisers face and if the benefits to them or their business match the time and effort put in. I asked the following group of indy conference and event organisers for their thoughts on the same topics: Dan Harrison, who runs SotonDigital Sam Noble, who runs Digital Females Gus Ferguson who runs OMN Jo Turnbull who [...]

ShareTweet Nichola just asked me this: Which sectors have you found surprisingly competitive and why? I decided to answer this from my own billion-feet-in-the-air perspective, ask my link builders, and ask a few SEOs who don’t do exactly what I do. The results were pretty cool but not cool enough to put into any form of spreadsheet or nice set of graphs. Just read. The floral industry was insanely difficult and pricey in my opinion. This totally surprised me as I’d worked with that industry before and thought it was quite easy at the time but that was when I did regular SEO, not link building. I knew they would of course do big holiday and seasonal pushes as they’re [...]

ShareTweet So it’s that time of the month (shut up!) when I need to write something clever here but you know what? I’m out of clever today. However, recently I’ve been having fantastic conversations with my link builders about ways to keep our job interesting, and we’ve been coming up with some insanely silly discovery ideas and search terms, none of which I will repeat because the best ones are offensive and would make us look highly unprofessional. Sometimes we are. I’ve also been really, really enjoying some of the truly poor comments that I see on sites and that led me down a nostalgic SEO-Chicks comment-path, which is here for your viewing pleasure…wow, we had some good ones!! 3,389 [...]

ShareTweet There have been a lot of discussions about online privacy recently, from those of us who work in the online world to newsrooms and parliaments. I want to take a look at what really matters to people when they’re online and highlight a few areas that are often overlooked. Specifically, I’m looking at the cookie law (and flaws for webmasters), Google’s Privacy Policy (and flaws for users), and also some useful tips to help you understand things better (or see where Google’s got it wrong!).

ShareTweet On May 30, 2007, Lisa Myers wrote the first post for the new SEO Chicks site. At that time we were three: Lisa, myself, and Anita Chaperon. Lisa was working for Base One, I was working as a contract SEO for a company in London where Anita handled PPC. I’m not sure that any of us had written much back then (I’m pretty sure that I’d only written one online article, and that was about a band called Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!) but we felt there was a dearth of visible female writers in SEO at the time so we decided to fix that. We’ve been through several changes at SEO Chicks over the years, most notably with [...]

ShareTweet So, before we kick off it’s probably useful to define what I mean by linkbait – here’s a quick and dirty definition from yours truly: “Linkbait is content which people *want* to share and link to.” For the sake of clarity when I’m talking about linkbait, I’m talking about link-worthy content. This includes, but is not limited to infographics (not that I’m an infographic-hater; actually it’s a form which I like and have had success with) but it’s not the only type of creative content that you can do. Before you kick off… Before I get stuck right into the process, I’d strongly advise you to be open and honest about creative link building strategies. Make sure your boss [...]